Friday, April 27, 2007

Publishing 2.0 was very enjoyable. I picked up some interesting perspectives/twists/thoughts on the future of "traditional" publishing - mostly from an STM perspective. Congrats to Alex, Eamon etc. on another great event.

The venue was probably the most spine tingling one I have ever been in for a tech. conference. Bletchley Park. The ghost of Alan Turing walking around the huts. The clickity clack of colossus. Turing of the famous test. Turing of the limits of computability. Turing who took Wittgenstein to task on the Phil of Mathematics (and survived). Turing of Cryptonomicon.

Monday, April 23, 2007

Barcamp Dublin was a fun event. Great location (once you get inside the building), terrible WIFI (for *any* place - never mind for a Digital Hub) but a great space that gradually filled up with interesting people with interesting things to say and all sorts of synergising banter going on. Very high content to fluff ratio.

I had to head home to the metropolis of Sligo afterwards so I missed the pub bit which I'm sure would have been equally good - and probably had better WIFI.

Early on, Joe Drumgoole pointed to the smallest of the three meeting rooms and said something like "all of you who want to talk about Java and XML and whatnot, go in there". So, I grabbed the bull by the horns and ended up speaking first with a free slot that I was able to flow into after my official slot.

The slides only dimly reflect what we talked about but here they are : in OpenOffice format and PDF format.

Some items I noted

Atom was not mentioned even once. Never. I don't know if that is because RSS is the collective noun for syndication formats or because nobody there has Atom on their radar or becuase it just never came up.

The word "Ruby" was never mentioned on its own. The Teutonic noun Rubyonrails was always used. The more I hear about it, the more I think "Lotus Notes done right". By contrast, TurboGears and Django when mentioned were always distinct from Python the language and there were many references to Python that had nothing to do with RAD for database-oriented webapps.

There is a sense in the blogging community that there will be a lot of social media usage surrounding the upcoming Election that may awaken mainstream consciousness to the power/implications of all this Web 2.0 geeky mullarky.